Brontë Studies. Volume 44. Issue 3

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 44 Issue 3, July 2019) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Introduction
pp. 255-256  Author: Amber M. Adams & Josephine Smith

Emily Brontë and Aspects of Platonic Attitudes
pp. 257-269  Author: Chitham, Edward
Abstract: 
Dr Johanna Schakenraad reminded us in her 2016 article in Brontë Studies of the incidence in Wuthering Heights of the word ‘soul’ and some of the contexts in which it is used. Hilary Newman took up the question of death in Wuthering Heights in July 2018. In this article I shall widen the enquiry to consider Emily Brontë’s intrinsically Platonic attitude in many matters which she absorbed and developed from the prevailing culture, giving examples from her writing, including poetry, with episodes and examples from her own life. In particular, the blurring of life and death in Wuthering Heights is deeply unfashionable and requires some mediation. I shall not deal in the present article with another influence, Stoicism, nor do I intend to examine subconscious or mythic implications of Emily’s usages.

Emily Brontë and German Romanticism: An Analysis of the Imagery of ‘Night’ in Emily Brontë’s and Novalis’s Writings
pp. 162-174 Author: Blowfield, Christine
Abstract: 
Many critics, including Juliet Barker, Edward Chitham, Christopher Heywood and Janet Gezari, have made reference to Charlotte Brontë’s meddling in her sisters’ work following their deaths. This article offers a detailed examination of the many interventions Charlotte made to the sixteen, arguably seventeen, poems by Emily that she selected for publication in 1850. Whilst some of these might be considered as editorially valid (such as changing explicit Gondal references and a minority of punctuation alterations), most, this article will argue, are not. Worse, the nature of Charlotte’s interventions impact negatively on Emily’s original vision and words. Through her 420 punctuation changes, 103 individual word changes, thirty-five whole-line or part-line substitutions, six instances of stanza deletions and additions, rewriting of the last two lines of ‘No coward soul is mine’ and the possible inclusion of one of her own poems, Charlotte effectively reframed Emily’s poetry as more orthodox and conventional than it was. In addition to a comprehensive analysis of all these interventions, this article will also consider the motivations behind the image of Emily that Charlotte sought to put forward through her editorial changes and in the ‘Biographical Notice’ and ‘Preface’ that accompanied the publication of the poems.

‘How well you read me, you witch!’: semantic drift of ‘witch’ and the choice of Jane Eyre
pp. 270-283  Author: Zhao, Jingjing
Abstract: 
Since the publication of Wuthering Heights in 1847, critics have long recognized the influence of British writers on Emily Brontë, such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shakespeare. In recent years, the possible influence of German Romanticism has also been noted by critics such as Maggie Allen and Elisha Cohn. The extent to which Emily Brontë was acquainted with German Romanticism still waits to be investigated in more depth and detail. In this article, I seek to examine this issue by introducing German poet and philosopher Novalis’s work Hymns to the Night and the Fragment and making a textual comparison between Novalis’s writings and Emily Brontë’s novel and lyrical work. Through an examination of the imagery of ‘Night’, along with a series of related concepts such as Dream, Vision, Slumber and Death in these two authors’ writings, I explore Emily Brontë’s acquaintance with, and understanding of, German Romantic ideology on a more comprehensive scale than has been done heretofore.

Immortal Love: Metin Erksan Reimagines Wuthering Heights
pp. 284-291  Author: Kaya, Nilay & Tekcan, Rana
Abstract: 
This article aims to look at a Turkish film adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. The 1966 black-and-white film, directed by the renowned director Metin Erksan, carries the story to a farm on the hills of Bosphorus, Istanbul. Although Erksan emphasizes the issue of class in the film, he is particularly interested in recreating the novel’s atmosphere in his own cinematic language. A director very much drawn to dark, destructive love stories throughout his career, Erksan manages to capture ‘the spirit’ of the novel with the help of his two lead actors. Immortal Love is an example of the avant-garde, at the crossroads of the national and the universal. It is an affirmation of the novel’s seemingly endless appeal and inspiration.

Enfolded Narrative in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Refusing ‘a perfect work of art’
pp. 292-305 Author: Shand, Elizabeth
Abstract:
This essay analyses the formal structure of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) as a critical response to rhetoric that conflated the novel with visual arts. Anne Brontë’s stance on the ‘sister arts’ juxtaposes the artistic standards used in literary reviews, a claim that frames the re-analysis of Tenant’s structure as ‘enfolded’. The essay then demonstrates how the structure prevents the interpretation of any scene as a static visualization and allows Anne Brontë to create a narrative dependent on the interrelation of multiple perspectives — something that the visual arts cannot accomplish. As a prescriptive extension of her critical mission, Tenant is a methodical critique of literary standards and places Anne Brontë among mid-century critics of the novel form.

MISCELLANY

A Brontë Reading List: Part 10 — Charlotte Brontë
pp. 306-322 Author:  Ogden, James; Pearson, Sara L.; Cook, Peter
Abstract:
The 2016 bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth and was marked by an unusually large number of publications on her life and work, including special journal issues of Victorian Review (42.2) and Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (130). In order to accommodate all of this work, we have decided to review the year in two sections: the present list, which covers Charlotte Brontë alone, and a subsequent list which will cover Emily and Anne Brontë.
This list is part of an annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical work. The earlier parts were published in Brontë Studies, 32.2 (July 2007), 33.3 (November 2008), 34.3 (November 2009), 36.4 (November 2011), 37.3 (September 2012), 39.1 (January 2014), 41.3 (September 2016), 42.4 (November 2017), and 43.4 (October 2018). The present part covers work published in 2016.
Bibliographical details are followed where possible by summaries and assessments. Essays published in Brontë Studies are as a rule excluded, as are books reviewed in Brontë Studies; readers are directed to the publisher’s website, www.tandfonline.com, for online access. The author of each entry is indicated by the author’s initials in brackets following the entry.

REVIEWS

Facets of Wuthering Heights: Selected Essays
pp. 323-325 Author:  Duckett, Bob

I Am Heathcliff: Stories inspired by Wuthering Heights
pp. 235-237 Author:  Stoneman, Patsy

Emily Brontë: A Life in 20 Poems
pp .325-327Author:  Cook, Peter

The Oxford Companion to the Brontës
pp. 329-328 Author:  Duckett, Bob

Haworth Timelines

pp. 329-331 Author:  Heywood, Christopher

OBITUARY

Sarah Fermi, 1935–2018. A Memoir
pp. 332-336  Author:  Stoneman, Patsy